Abstract
While soil organic carbon (C) is the foundation of productive and healthy ecosystems, the impact of the ecology of microorganisms on C-cycling remains unknown. We manipulated the diversity, applied here as species richness, of the microbial community present in similar soils on two contrasting land-covers—an adjacent pasture and forest—and observed the transformations of plant detritus and soil organic matter (SOM) using stable isotope (13C) tracing coupled with a novel nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiment. The amount of detritus-C degraded was not affected by the microbial diversity (p > 0.05), however the fate of detritus- and SOM-C across the diversity gradient was complex and land cover-dependent. For example, in the pasture soil, higher diversity led to lower CO2 production (p = 0.001), a trend driven solely by SOM-C mineralization. There was no relationship between diversity and detritus-C mineralization or production of new mineral-associations after one year (p > 0.05). In contrast, in the forest soil higher diversity resulted in increased detritus-C (p = 0.01) and SOM-C (p = 0.0008) mineralization and decreased mineral-associated organic matter formation (p = 0.02). In both land cover types, retention efficiency—a measure that integrates both microbial physiology and the ability of the ecosystem to retain C—explained C loss and transformation trends. Overall, this demonstrates that the trajectory of C gained and lost is altered by land management-induced changes to microbial communities, soil structure, and chemical characteristics underlying SOM persistence.
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Data availability
Unprocessed sequence data can be found in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Short Read Archive (SRA) under BioProject PRJNA690222 (accession numbers SAMN17246121-SAMN17246269) for the ITS region and under BioProject PRJNA689861 (accession numbers SAMN17220990-SAMN17221149) for the 16S gene. Associated biogeochemical data can be found in the Dryad data repository (https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.w9ghx3fnb).
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the CSIRO Soil Carbon and Nutrient cycling group, particularly Rose Davis, Nick Gunn, and Andrew Ernakovich for laboratory work, Janine McGowan for running and processing NMR data, and Adrien Gregg for qPCR consultation. Thank you to Steve Rogers, who allowed us to sample his land. Thank you to Richard Allcock and the UWA sequencing facility for the sequence data and consultation. We are grateful to Drs. Jen Shaw, Nina Welti and Jessica Mackay and Lukas Bernhardt for their review of the manuscript and contributions to its organization.
Funding
JE was supported by a CSIRO postdoctoral fellowship through the Office of the Chief Executive (awarded to MF, JB, JS and KK). MF was also supported by a CSIRO Julius Award.
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Ernakovich, J.G., Baldock, J., Creamer, C. et al. A combined microbial and ecosystem metric of carbon retention efficiency explains land cover-dependent soil microbial biodiversity–ecosystem function relationships. Biogeochemistry 153, 1–15 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-020-00736-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-020-00736-w